Welcome all. Over the years I have created websites for many things such as school projects, personal use, my classroom, and for professional organizations. Each time I've done this, I've used a program that uses a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) interface that writes all of the ugly HTML code for you.
Dr. Hall mentioned that we should be doing something DIFFERENT or NEW if we've had experience with websites before so is my first website where I am hand coding everything. It is good to have an understanding of HTML so that when you create a webpage, you understand what is going on "behind the scenes," meaning how the web browser interprets the HTML code. I will say that I did take some time to learn a bit of HTML and it did come in handy even though I've been useing WYSIWYG programs for a long time.
For me, there are several reasons I don't regularly hand code. First off, tt takes longer. As a busy music teacher, I didn't have time to worry about writing clean code. The program did it for me. Second, it is more difficult to make pages look professional or add advanced features such as a blog or a menu. Look at this site. It looks like something out of the 1990's! Although I could spend A LOT of time adding this or that, I could do that in NO TIME with a good website editor!
My favorite online resource for learning HTML, already mentioned by Dr. Hall, is W3 Schools http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp
Besides hand-coding, another thing I have done for this project is written my own Cascading Style Sheets, also known as CSS. Cascading Styles Sheets are used to style HTML. It uses a syntax that assigns styles (text color, background color, position attributs, bold, etc.) to different HTML tags. For instance, I this style set up so that every link is yellow when you hover your mouse over a hyperlink. The beautiful thing about CSS is that you can change the look of an entire website by just editing one file. I am using a linked CSS file, so each of my HTML pages links to it.
I wanted to show you how style sheets can make the SAME HTML look different, so you can click on the chooser below to see the identical HTML page as it renders with differnt CSS. CSS can do lots to a webpage, and I am just scratching the surface here. For the ultimate view of what CSS can do, visit the incredible website CSS Zen Garden.
The above javascript was provided by Dynamic Drive, a website that has lots of cool dynamic add-ons for your website.Read about the web programs I have used and the ones I currently use.
If you want to know about me, you can visit my real website. :-)
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